The present invention relates to character reading systems. More particularly, the invention relates to an optical character reading system in which characters on a sheet are manually scanned and the characters thus scanned are optically read.
In a conventional character and symbol reading device, hereinafter referred to merely as "an OCR", in which characters, symbols or the like, hereinafter referred to simply as character patterns, are read by manually moving a scanner or observation system and character areas in both vertical and horizontal directions are detected. When a character reaches a predetermined position on the scanner, the character is recognized and an appropriate recognition output signal is generated.
However, it should be noted that, in the above-described device, there is usually only one predetermined position at which the character can be recognized. Therefore, if there is a great deal of noise at that position, it is likely that the character cannot be accurately read.